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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

because once Jeff Dean had solved Google's maslow problems (scaling web search, making ads profitable, developing high performance machine learning systems) he wanted to return to doing academic-style research, but with the benefit of Google's technical and monetary resources, and not part of X, which never produces anything of long-term value. I know for sure he wanted to make an impact in medical AI and felt that being part of a research org would make that easier/more possible than if he was on a product team.

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I generally agree with this though with some tweaks. I think Jeff wanted to do something that he thought was both awesome (he's liked neural networks for a long time - his undergrad thesis was on them) and likely to have long-term major impact for Google, and he was able to justify the Awesome Thing by identifying a way for it to have significant potential revenue impact for Google via improvements to ad revenue, as well as significant potential "unknown huge transformative possibilities" benefits. But I do suspect that you're right that the heart of it was "Jeff was really passionate about this thing".

Of course, this starts to get at different versions of the question: Why did Google Brain exist in 2012 as a scrappy team of builders, and why did Brain exist in 2019 as a mega-powerhouse of AI research? I think you and I are talking about the former question, and TFA may be focusing more on the second part of the question.

[I was randomly affiliated with Brain from 2015-2019 but wasn't there in the early days]

It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and people. They had a great cachet- I was working hard to join Brain in 2012 because it seemed like they were one of the few groups who had access to the necessary CPU and data sets and mental approaches that would transform machine learning. And at that time, they used that cachet to hire a bunch of up and coming researchers (many of them Hinton's students or in his sphere) and wrote up some pretty great papers.

Many people outside of Brain were researchers working on boring other projects who transferred in, bringing their internal experience in software development and deployment, which helped a lot on the infra side.

I agree that the OP makes a bunch of interesting points, but I think historically Brain really grew out of what Dean wanted to do and the fact that he wanted it to be full-stack, e.g. including the TPU. Also, crucially, Brain would use Google data and contribute back to Ads/Search directly versus Google X which was supposed to be more of an incubator.

But it's also notable how the perspective of an ex-Brain employee might differ from what sparked the Brain founders in the first place.

Waymo?

waymo hasn't produced anything of long-term value yet. And everything about it that worked well wasn't due to Google X

Can you expand why being part of Google X hinders a team? I believe Waymo "graduated" from Google X to its own entity.

X exists as a press-release generation system, not as a real technology creation system. They onboard many impractical projects that are either copies of something being done already in industry ("but with more Google and ML!") or doesn't have a market (space elevators).

Waymo has developed the modern autonomous vehicle from the ground up. It's basically a matter of scale now. It's a mindblowing tech stack. The first time riding in one is much more otherwordly than using GPT for the first time. The value of the technology is far greater whatever PR they have generated (not many people know about it)

I have infinite respect for the process that Waymo followed to get to where they are. And I'm impressed that Google continued to fund the project and move it forward even when it represents such a long-term bet.

but it's not a product that has any real revenue. and most car companies keep their distance from google self-driving tech because they're afraid. afraid google wants to put them out of business. It's unclear if google could ever sell (as a product, as an IP package, etc) what they've created because it depends so deeply on a collection of technology google makes available to waymo.

I was just disputing "X exists as a press-release generation system, not as a real technology creation system." Definitely agree the path to profitability will be tough.

If the technology is not in production, is the creation complete?

I visited Arizona, downloaded the app and did two complex rides with no driver. So yeah I'd say it's currently in production.

Waymo predates X.

Waymo is kind of like DeepMind - they're costing Alphabet billions of dollars a year for a decade+ with no appreciable revenue to show for it, but they're working on something neat, so surely it must be good?

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